This invention pertains to the art of medical restraining or bracing devices and more particularly to a device for restraining the head of an injured person against movement while resting on a spine board.
In many accidents which involve severe physical harm to a person, spinal injuries are often overshadowed by more obvious and gruesome injuries such as bone fractures, skin lacerations and chest injuries. Since a spinal injury is an internal injury, ambulance and rescue personnel often have trouble identifying spinal injuries and, if identified, they are usually treated after the more obvious wounds have been treated and the person has been moved. However, any such spinal injury is usually compounded by movement or adjustment of the injured spine, thereby causing more permanent and irreparable damage.
Spinal cord injuries cannot always be corrected by surgery. In addition, the spinal cord has extremely limited self-healing powers. Thus it is vital that a rescuer to an injured person be able to immobilize known or suspected spinal fractures and dislocations quickly and correctly, since proper immobilization may be essential to obtain recovery and avoid paralysis or even death.
It is a conventional practice among ambulance and rescue personnel to rigidly immobilize conscious and unconscious accident victims having a known or suspected spinal injury. Such immobilization typically occurs by lashing the patient to a short spine board with a later transfer to a longer spine board or immediate immobilization on a long spine board. In all instances though, the patient is firmly lashed in a face up position to the board. However, when a rescuer comes upon an accident where the victim has suffered severe injuries, the extra minutes spent or lashing the victim to the short spine board and then transferral to a long spine board, may be life threatening.
Other situations may require an undesirable amount of time for extrication of the accident victim from the accident such as in an automobile wreckage or where the short spine board might not fit. For these situations, it is conventional practice to place a cervical collar on the patient while extricating him from the accident wreckage and for placement onto a long spine board and more firm immobilization thereon.
The most commonly used method for cervical immobilization on the long spine board includes restraining the movement of the head with sand bags in association with a conventional cervical collar. It has been found that the defects present in such cervical immobilization devices are such that the devices themselves are of limited value.
Many times immobilizing sand bags are not sufficiently secured to the injured person or the spine board and will move off of their proper position. In addition, since a sand bag is deformable but not elastomeric, the bags may be deformed away from their proper molded positions about the head and allow potentially further damaging movement to the head and spine.
Other known restraining devices such as are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,672,364; U.S. Pat. No. 4,034,748; U.S. Pat. No. 4,124,908; and British Pat. No. 436,549 suffer the more common problem of having a head immobilization device which is limited in its ability to be positioned relative to the head of an injured party by interconnecting members between the restraining devices and the associated spine board. Thus it is necessary to properly position the injured party relative to the restraining device and spine board for proper restrainment. This is a particular disadvantage because such a procedure often requires inconvenient movement of the injured person to obtain the proper position proper to use of the restraining devices.
The present invention contemplates a new and improved cervical immobilization device which overcomes the above referred to problems and others to provide a new cervical immobilization device which is simple in design, economical to manufacture, readily adaptable to a plurality of uses with spine boards having a variety of dimensional characteristics, easy to position, easy to remove and which provides improved immobilization to the spine of an injured person.